Value For Money

Guest's review of Nutracheck - www.nutracheck.co.uk

There is no magic to the principles behind nutracheck - calorie restriction and exercise. I consider myself reasonably well educated on diet, nutrition and exercise and so previously shunned this sort of site - my thinking was that it couldn't teach me anything I didn't know already. I have to say that nutracheck has made a phenomenal difference to my efforts to lose weight and maintain fitness. I had underestimated the psychological benefits of getting a green tick at the end of the day and recording my progress.

The discipline of logging calories and exercise makes me more conscious of what I am eating (in an informed rather than obsessive manner) and encourages me to move more. I have identified hidden calories in my diet - particularly those skinny lattes and glasses of red wine. Using the diary helps me plan my calorie consumption so that I can have a takeaway and a couple of glasses of wine without guilt or weight gain.

The diary is very easy to use - containing a huge range of food items, including most of the sandwich chains. It also has the capacity for you to manually enter foods and create and store your own receipes for meals that you cook at home.

Exercise is also easy to enter. You can either rely on the typical calorie consumption values for a particular type of exercise or enter a precise number of calories burnt. I also now wear a pedometer daily and enter my step count.

The forums and articles are a further useful resource.

My only slight criticism is that it is BMI focused. I train hard and body fat would be a more useful measurement. That said, you set your own goals and I judge my progress by what I see in the mirror and what my fat monitor and clothes tell me rather than being a slave to BMI.

I am so thoroughly converted that I kept up my membership once I hit my target weight to help me maintain - after all membership doesn't cost more per month than a couple of Starbucks lattes!